“Beyond the Journal and the Blog: The Technical Report for
Communication in the Humanities”
Nick Montfort

AMODERN is a peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journal devoted to
the study of media, culture, and poetics. Its purpose is to provide a
forum for interdisciplinary conversations about the role of media and
technology in contemporary cultural practices. We are particularly
interested in those topics that normally escape scrutiny, or are
ignored or excluded for whatever reason.

The journal is distinguished by its focus on poetics as a scholarly
practice, with particular emphasis on the unruly ways that people
deploy media and technology behind, beneath, and despite their
instrumental functions. Against the grain of determinism, we hope to
attract work that bears witness to media as complex assemblages of
institutions, subjects, bodies, objects, and discourses.

Editorial Board

Adventure chooses you. Here are two recently declassified Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style stories from the Eastern Bloc, part of the “You Will Select A Decision” series which was written in 1987 in Russian, translated to English, but intercepted by the CIA before its influence could reach our shores. Thanks to Brendan Patrick Hennessy and the magic of Twine, both 1 – Small Child In Woods and the romp through American history 2 – Cow Farming Activities on the Former West are now available at the “You Will Select A Decision” site. Thanks to Stuart Moulthrop for the tip.

A journalist just asked me if there were any famous authors involved with electronic literature.

I could have dropped a few names, but instead I wrote:

There are, but revolutions in literature do not happen because famous people start using new technologies. They happen because of innovation that comes from young people, new authors, and new readers. Think about important literary movements – how many of them were started when already-famous authors changed their behavior?

Maybe some of you can think of counterexamples in which literary movements were started by already-established literary figures. If so, I’ll stand corrected.

This is Nick Montfort's blog about interactive narrative, imaginative and poetic digital writing, the material history of computational media, video and computer games, and other stuff he likes. Nick has a plain old website, too.